NEW YORK. Workers in Hangar 17 at JFK International Airport load steel that was selected for the Denver memorials. Fifteen Colorado communities will receive beams, including Aurora, Brighton, Colorado Springs, Durango, Frisco, Grand Junction and Louisville. (Steve Crecelius, The CELL)

More than 230,000 pounds of rusty, twisted steel will arrive Monday in Denver, when a police and military escort will lead a flatbed truck loaded with massive beams along a route punctuated with stops for solemn honor-guard ceremonies.

Similar activities are happening all across America, part of a program run by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey that has donated steel recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers to cities, firehouses, museums and military bases for use in Sept. 11 memorials on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

Denver’s steel will eventually be included in memorials at Babi Yar Park and at the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (CELL).

The Port Authority received more than 2,000 requests for about 1,200 beams housed in Hangar 17 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The collection includes artifacts from that moment in time, including firetrucks and other emergency-response vehicles incinerated by the heat of the burning towers.

Beams are going to the 50 states and seven countries, including China. In Colorado, 15 communities will receive pieces of beams, including Aurora, Brighton, Colorado Springs, Durango, Frisco, Grand Junction and Louisville.

Denver’s shipment will arrive on five flatbed trucks that were loaded Thursday with a metal-and-concrete corner fitting that measures 6 feet tall by 8 feet long, and 15 beams, each about 35 feet long.

Melanie Pearlman, part of the 11-member team that selected steel for Denver, is still awed by a moment in Hangar 17 when the curator pointed out a massive tangle of metal.

“He said, ‘This is a very delicate piece of steel, because we believe it is the top five floors of the North Tower, and many of the families who lost members believe this is their burial ground,’ ” said Pearlman, executive director of The CELL. “You couldn’t do anything but tear up.”

VIEW OF TERROR. Helen Ginsburg, one of the founders of Babi Yar Park at East Yale Avenue and South Havana Street, peeks through a slit in a large wooden wall on the park’s “The Bridge Over the Ravine” feature. The park honors the more than 100,000 people, mostly Jews, who were massacred by the Nazis in the Babi Yar Ravine of Kiev, Ukraine, between September 1941 and November 1943. “The Bridge” represents the railway cattle cars used to transport Jews, gypsies, Ukrainians and others to the Babi Yar Ravine before they were killed. The park is being reinvented as the Memorial to the Victims of World Terrorism at Babi Yar Park. (Andy Cross, The Denver Post)

Ellen Premack, executive director of the Mizel Museum, said the visit to Hangar 17 was “indescribable.”

“You heard about (the attacks), you watched it and tried to understand the story, but to go into a giant complex, where the remains and pieces were categorized so they could be understood, was humbling to the point of disbelief,” she said.

Memorials made from Sept. 11 artifacts serve much the same purpose as relics or shrines, creating a sense of connection, said Kenneth Foote, a University of Colorado professor who has written extensively on the transformation of places touched by tragedy and violence. He knew people killed when one of the terrorist-hijacked planes crashed into the Pentagon.

“It’s a way of expressing grief,” he said. “Events like this affect more than the immediate victims. It’s a way of connecting with the dead and showing respect.”

The Sept. 11 memorials also aid in reclaiming political power lost in the terrorist attacks, Foote said.

“They are a way of saying, ‘Let’s come together; we aren’t going to live our lives governed by these terrorists,’ ” he said.

In Denver, a support beam from the South Tower will be included in The CELL’s redesigned exhibit, scheduled to open in late September.

Most of the steel will be used in installations at Babi Yar Park, which is being reinvented as the Memorial to the Victims of World Terrorism at Babi Yar Park.

PROUD TO HELP: Timothy Bedard, an operations manager with JRC Transportation, shows off a shirt his company had made for its part in moving steel from the World Trade Center towers to Colorado. Denver s shipment will arrive on five flatbed trucks. (Craig Ruttle, Special to The Denver Post)

Eleven pieces will be made into a permanent Sept. 11 memorial that will be set in a contemporary granite-and- glass foundation in the park. The remaining three pieces will be used elsewhere in the park, for which plans are still being developed.

Until that work is done, some of the beams will be part of an exhibit at District 475, 10111 Inverness Main St. in Arapahoe County. The exhibit will include educational tools and a documentary created by The CELL that begins with the loading of the beams in New York.

Parts of that documentary will also be shown at The CELL, which educates citizens on global terrorism and how to protect against it, and at the renovated Babi Yar Park.

The team that chose Denver’s steel included architects and artists, including Jim Bershof of OZ Architecture in Denver, and the Cambridge, Mass.- based design team of Julian Bonder and Krzysztof Wodiczko, who won an international competition to transform Babi Yar into a public landscape that memorializes victims of terrorism worldwide.

The combined work of Bonder and Wodiczko spans public projects dealing with survivors of urban and political violence, genocide and the Holocaust, including the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum and the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, France.

The World Trade Center steel might never have come to Denver if not for real estate mogul Larry Mizel, who created the two places that will ultimately display it: the Mizel Museum and The CELL.

“He saw how powerful museums and exhibits were in bringing a very dark and difficult subject matter to the public in a way that really addresses these issues, and helps people engage and overcome,” Pearlman said of Mizel, who is international chairman of the board of the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. “He felt it was within his legacy to create something that addresses terrorism on a substantive level for the public.”

A few years before The CELL opened in 2009, the Mizel Museum merged with the Babi Yar Park Foundation, the group charged with stewardship of the park built to memorialize the estimated more than 100,000 people killed in Kiev, Ukraine, by the Nazis during World War II in a ravine called Babi Yar.

“A lot of the founders are getting older, and we didn’t want it to go to wrack and ruin,” said Denver architect Alan Gass, who in 1971 joined the committee that designed the park and served as president of its foundation.

As the new stewards of the park, Mizel and Premack wanted to broaden its message.

“We want to tell the continuing story, that the Babi Yars of history are not over yet,” Premack said. “Genocide continues, and terrorism is a new form of man’s inhumanity against each other.”

The Better Denver Bond Program included $3 million to update the infrastructure of Babi Yar, and the Mizel Museum is working to raise an estimated $3.5 million to complete the entire public art project.

The first stage, the Sept. 11 memorial, is expected to be installed in 2012.

“We want people to come here and feel the sacred space,” Premack said. “Sacred in the sense that will associate different people’s stories and times in history. It will be very American and global in its sense of sacredness.”

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Stew Webb 34 Years a Federal Whistle blower
Stew Webb served in the United States Marine Corps and was Honorable Discharge. Stew was a General Contractor-Home Builder until 3 car crashes in one year and is now disabled. Stew turned Federal Whistle blower – Activist of 31 years and has been a guest on over 3,000 Radio and TV Programs since September 18, 1991 and now has his own Radio and TV Network http://www.stewwebb.com Stew was responsible for the Congressional Investigations and hearings that lead to the Appointment of Independent Prosecutor Arlin Adams in the 1989 HUD Hearings, the Silverado Savings and Loan Hearings, the Denver International Airport Frauds hearings, the MDC Holdings, Inc. (MDC-NYSE) Illegal Political Campaign Money Laundering Colorado’s biggest case aka Keating 5 hearings and the information provided that lead to the 2008 Illegal Bank Bailout.
Stew was held as a Political Prisoner from 1992-1993 to silence his exposure by Leonard Millman his former in law with illegal charges of threatening harassing telephone calls charges which were dismissed with prejudice. Leonard Millman, George HW Bush, George W Bush, Jeb Bush, Neil Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Larry Mizel, Phil Winn, Norman Brownstein, John McCain and Mitt Romney to name a few are all partners in what is known as the Bush-Millman-Clinton Organized Crime Syndicate. Leonard Millman (Deceased 2004) was member of the “Illuminati Council of 13”

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